When Freedom Came to Charleston

Nearly two dozen fires burned out of control across Charleston, S.C., on Feb. 18, 1865, as the Union Army moved into the city where the Civil War had begun four years earlier. A brutal 545-day siege, the longest in American history, had reduced much of the city to rubble and driven away most wealthy residents, while Gen. William T. Sherman’s march through the heart of South Carolina — which threatened to cut off Charleston’s supply line — had prompted Confederate forces in the city to set fire to cotton supplies and munitions and then evacuate.

But the Union soldiers who advanced into Charleston were welcomed with open arms — and not just because they helped put out the flames. Thousands of former slaves thrilled at the sight of their liberators, most of whom were members of the 21st United States Colored Troops. “The negroes cheer us, bless us, dance for joy when they see our glorious flag — pray for us, fight for us, ‘can’t love us enough,’ as they beautifully express it,” wrote James Redpath, a correspondent for The New-York Tribune.

Over the next few months, as the Civil War ground to a halt, Charleston was transformed from the birthplace of secession into the graveyard of slavery. In parades, commemorations and demonstrations, local freedmen and women joined with the occupying force to mark Union victory and the end of the peculiar institution. Although the city had been practically burned to the ground, revelry reigned. Each week brought yet another “festival of freedom,” as the black abolitionist William C. Nell had once dubbed such pageants.

Before the war, Charleston had been the capital of American slavery. Nearly half the slaves transported to what would become the United States first stepped foot on American soil on nearby Sullivan’s Island, “the Ellis Island” of black America. After the international slave trade was closed in 1808, Charleston continued to be a vibrant market for slaves traded locally, as well as for those sold to the burgeoning cotton plantations of Mississippi and Louisiana.

And it wasn’t just the buying and selling of human beings that made slavery so central to the city. For much of its early history, Charleston had a black and enslaved majority and, in the decades leading up to the Civil War, most white households owned at least one slave. Little wonder that Charleston played host not only to the 1860 South Carolina Secession Convention, which broke up the Union in the defense of slavery, but also to the opening salvo of the war with the 1861 firing on Fort Sumter.

This history was no doubt on the minds of black Charlestonians as they observed the liberation of the city four years later. Just hours after Charleston fell, hundreds of newly emancipated men, women and children rejoiced when a company from the Massachusetts 54th marched across the Citadel Green, a park at the center of Charleston. “Shawls, aprons, hats, everything was waved,” wrote C.H. Corey, a Northern minister accompanying the troops. “Old men wept. The young women danced and jumped, and cried, and laughed” in an outpouring of emotion that brought even the soldiers to tears.

Three days later, the all-black Massachusetts 55th Regiment arrived, singing “John Brown’s Body” to the African-American crowds that cheered them on. “Imagine, if you can, this stirring song chanted with the most rapturous, most exultant emphasis, by a regiment of negro troops, who have been lying in sight of Charleston for nearly two years — as they trod with tumultuous delight along the streets of this pro-Slavery city,” Redpath wrote. Some of the men in the 55th “had walked those streets before as slaves,” noted Charles C. Coffin, a Boston Daily Journal correspondent. But now they were free, “soldiers of the Union, defenders of its flag.”

Photo

Members of the 55th Massachusetts marching through Charleston, S.C. in February 1865.Credit Library of Congress

Freedpeople assembled again on Feb. 27 to receive the rest of the Massachusetts 54th. “On the day we entered that rebellious city, the streets were thronged with women and children of all sizes, colors and grades — the young, the old, the halt, the maimed, and the blind,” observed John H.W.N. Collins, a black sergeant. “I saw an old colored woman with a crutch — for she could not walk without one, having served all her life in bondage — who, on seeing us, got so happy, that she threw down her crutch, and shouted that the year of Jubilee had come.” One week later, 5,000 African-Americans filed through the city in a show of affection for President Lincoln after his second inauguration.

Perhaps the largest festival of freedom was held on Tuesday, March 21, when a crowd of 10,000 gathered at Citadel Green. For decades the park had served as a parade ground for the adjacent South Carolina Military Academy, also known as the Citadel. But now the grounds where white cadets, charged with protecting the city against a slave insurrection, had regularly conducted public exercises became the gathering point for a parade of black Union soldiers and countless African-Americans. According to Redpath, the assembled viewed the procession as “a celebration of their deliverance from bondage and ostracism; a jubilee of freedom, a hosannah to their deliverers.”

The parade started at about 1 p.m., under rain-filled skies, and took several hours to wind its way down King Street to the Battery, and then back to Citadel Green. Led by various dignitaries on horseback, a marching band and the 21st United States Colored Troops, the procession also included local tradesmen, fire companies and nearly 2,000 newly enrolled schoolchildren singing songs like “John Brown’s Body.”

Most striking was a large mule-drawn cart bearing a sign that read, “A number of negroes for sale” and carrying a faux auctioneer’s block and four African-Americans — one man, two women and a child — all of whom had been sold at some point in their lives. The man playing the role of auctioneer cried out to the crowd along the parade route, “How much am I offered for this good cook?” “She can make four kinds of mock-turtle soup — from beef, fish or fowls.” “Who bids?” Behind the auction cart trailed a simulated slave coffle comprising some 60 men, “tied to a rope — in imitation of the gangs who used often to be led through these streets on their way from Virginia to the sugar-fields of Louisiana.”

The participants in this carnivalesque display intended to ridicule the system under which so many in Charleston — and the rest of the South — had suffered for so long, and the show did in fact, as one observer noted, produce “much merriment.” Yet it touched a little too close to home for some. “Old women burst into tears as they saw this tableau,” Redpath reported, “and forgetting that it was a mimic scene, shouted wildly, ‘Give me back my children! Give me back my children!’”

Following the auction cart and slave coffle came an unambiguously comic feature of the tableau: a hearse carrying a coffin labeled “Slavery,” which elicited laughter among the audience. A decade earlier, Boston abolitionists protesting the rendition of runaway slave Anthony Burns had suspended a large black coffin, with the word “Liberty” painted in white, along the route by which Burns was marched back into bondage under armed guard. Now, the tables were turned, and the funeral procession was for slavery, not liberty.

Scrawled in chalk on the hearse were the inscriptions, “Slavery Is Dead,” “Who Owns Him,” “No One” and “Sumter Dug His Grave on the 13th of April, 1861.” A long train of female mourners dressed in black followed behind the coffin, their smiling faces the only tell of their true sentiments. “Charleston never before witnessed such a spectacle,” concluded The New York Times correspondent of the day’s events.

The festivities fueled the frantic chatter of upcountry slaveholders. Charleston expats traded stories — some true, others false or exaggerated — of interracial balls, plots of black insurrection and the theft and wanton destruction of private property. In Columbia, Emma LeConte seethed in her diary that Charleston recently “had a most absurd procession described in glowing colors and celebrating the Death of Slavery.” It was a world turned upside down. “Abolitionists delivered addresses on the superiority of the black race over white — Adam and Eve were black, so were Cain and Abel, but when the former slew his brother, his great fright turned him white!”

Related

Despite their anger and unease, most whites back in Charleston scrambled to demonstrate their allegiance to the United States by taking the loyalty oath. Surrounded by black soldiers and their former slaves, the few Confederate sympathizers who remained were too chastened to protest any of the celebrations that spring. The New York Times reported that the “slavery is dead” parade “was by no means pleasant to the old residents, but they had sense enough to keep their thoughts to themselves.”

Northerners marveled at the new climate in Charleston. “I have given utterance to my most radical sentiments to try their temper, and have not even succeeded in making any one threaten me by word, look or gesture,” insisted Charles C. Coffin in late February. “William Lloyd Garrison or Wendell Phillips or Henry Ward Beecher can speak their minds in the open air … without fear of molestation.”

A couple of months later, Garrison and Beecher would do just that. On April 14, 1865, exactly four years after Maj. Robert Anderson had surrendered Fort Sumter to Confederate Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard, the two Northern abolitionists joined thousands of former slaves and Union soldiers, including Anderson himself, at a ceremony to commemorate the return of the American flag to the small island fort. “No more war! No more accursed secession! No more slavery, that spawned them both!” Beecher intoned to an uproar of applause.

These festivals continued throughout the year. Black Charlestonians inaugurated Decoration Day (May 1), observed the Fourth of July and celebrated the anniversaries of West Indian emancipation (Aug. 1) and Lincoln’s final Emancipation Proclamation (Jan. 1). It was all a fitting reminder of how much had changed since 1861: The capital of slavery had become the citadel of freedom. As one abolitionist newspaper, The National Anti-Slavery Standard, had observed in March, “Historical justice and poetical justice sometimes coincide in the annals of mankind, but rarely so exactly as in the example of the city of Charleston.”

Sources: New-York Tribune, March 2, March 28 and April 4, 1865; Charleston Courier, March 21 and March 22, 1865; The Independent, March 16 and May 4, 1865; The National Anti-Slavery Standard, March 18, 1865; The Augusta Daily Constitutionalist, March 29, 1865; The New York Times, March 30, April 4 and April 11, 1865; The Christian Recorder, April 15, 1865; The Newark Daily Advertiser, April 13, 1865; The St. Johnsbury Caledonian, March 17 and Nov. 17, 1865; Luis F. Emilio, “History of the Fifty-Fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers Infantry, 1863-1865”; “Record of the Service of the Fifty-Fifth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry”; John Chipman Gray and John Codman Ropes, “War Letters, 1862-1865 of John Chipman Gray and John Codman Ropes”; Gerald Schwartz, ed., “A Woman Doctor’s Civil War: Esther Hill Hawks’ Diary”; Charles C. Coffin, “The Boys of ’61; or, Four Years of Fighting”; Daniel E. Huger Smith, et al., eds., “Mason Smith Family Letters, 1860-1868”; Earl Schenk Miers, ed., “When the World Ended: The Diary of Emma LeConte”; Walter J. Fraser, “Charleston! Charleston! The History of a Southern City”; Noah Andre Trudeau, “Like Men of War: Black Troops in the Civil War, 1862-1865”; David W. Blight, “Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory”; Kathleen A. Clark, “Defining Moments: African American Commemoration and Political Culture in the South, 1863-1913”; Mitch Kachun, “Festivals of Freedom: Memory and Meaning in African American Emancipation Celebrations, 1808-1915”; Bernard E. Powers Jr., “Black Charlestonians: A Social History, 1825-1885”; Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion”; Richard C. Wade, “Slavery in the Cities: The South 1820-1860”; Bruce E. Baker, “What Reconstruction Meant: Historical Memory in the American South.”

Blain Roberts, the author of the book “Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women: Race and Beauty in the Twentieth-Century South,” and Ethan J. Kytle, the author of the book “Romantic Reformers and the Antislavery Struggle in the Civil War Era,” are associate professors of history at California State University, Fresno. They are currently co-authoring a book about the memory of slavery in Charleston, S.C.

What's Next

One-hundred-and-fifty years ago, Americans went to war with themselves. Disunion revisits and reconsiders America’s most perilous period — using contemporary accounts, diaries, images and historical assessments to follow the Civil War as it unfolded.